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Glacial Lake Missoula Wine Co (GLM)

Glacial Lake Missoula - A Portrait (2015)

About

We are a small, innovative, garagistes-style winery based in Blaine, using Yakima Valley, WA & Umpqua Valley, OR, winegrapes. Our focus is on making full bodied, concentrated reds, and the world's first Enrobed wines: unprecedented combinations of red and white winegrapes that make spectacular red and red sparkling wines. Annual production is limited to only 250 cases, and we only age our wines in French oak cooperage.

Location Description

Based in the border-town of Blaine, Washington.

Features

Makers of innovative Northeast wines since 2002.

Additional Information

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Winemaker

Tom Davis & Tracey Degraff

History

We are Tom Davis & Tracey DeGraff, a Vancouver B.C. couple. Tom is a former brew-master and bartender, and Tracey is also from the hospitality industry.

As passionate amateurs, we experimented for a decade making red wine from grapes from wine regions all over the Northwest. In 2000 we discovered how superior eastern Washington’swine-grapes really were, in making a truly awesome wine from a ton of Cabernet Sauvignon from a vineyard near Sunnyside, in the Yakima Valley.

In 2002 we started the winery in Blaine, WA, 50 kilometers from our home in Vancouver, but the closest point in Washington State. True to form, the winery is in a converted garage, and uses both modern refrigerated stainless tanks, and traditional cooperage.

Practices & Techniques

Saignier - To bleed-off a portion (10 - 40%) of the colorless juice immediately after crushing red wine grapes. This makes a more intensely colored wine with more mouthfeel, aroma, and aging potential. Almost all of the great wines Bordeaux and Burgundy have some amount of saignier. It isn't widely talked about because most wineries prefer their customers, wine experts and media completely clueless about how wine is made!

Sparging - Boiling off Hydrogen Sulphide and other dissolved gas from freshly fermented wines, or wine that has just completed malolactic. This prevents mercaptan and other noxious sulphur compounds from getting a foot-hold in young wine. It also helps eliminates excess diacetyl (butterscotch aromas) after malolactic. It is done with inert Nitrogen gas, bubbled through a carbonating stone, which squeezes out gasses dissolved in wine or must, but does not itself remain dissolved in wine.

Low pH - Many winemakers are taught to acidulate (add acid) to wines near bottling time, as a final adjustment, at the last moment. This is totally wrong. It is like vaccinating your children after they reach adulthood. The optimum time to adjust acidity is at crush, using tartaric acid. This ensures clean fermentations, with no need to add sulphites at crush, and allowing the young wine to be naturally protected by the bacteria inhibiting acid. With a good, low pH, minimal sulphites, are also required over the wine's time in the tank or barrel.